


The Lone and Level Sands

by takethembystorm



Series: Tea Break [30]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-22
Updated: 2016-09-22
Packaged: 2018-08-16 15:50:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 720
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8108308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/takethembystorm/pseuds/takethembystorm
Summary: A retelling of the death of Jeanne d'Arc.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://jesuisunjardin.tumblr.com/post/145055291773).

The Lord Henry Grey, 3rd Baron Grey of Codnor, makes his way through the crowd, his eyes fixed upon the slight girl upon the platform.  


Now she wears a shift of undyed linen, but he’s more used to seeing her resplendent in a full suit of armor as fine as any produced by any smith in England, a whole-cloth red and black-spotted tabard her coat of arms. His Ladybug, and he, beside her, her Black Knight. Her Chat Noir, she’d always said.  


He stares at her as the chains are locked into place, though she stands there without offering any resistance, calm and composed as he’s ever seen her. Her earrings aren’t there, he notes somewhere in the back of his head, though she’d had them when she was captured. Passed on to her successor, or to the Guardian in all likelihood.

As his ring would need to be. It burns, hot and accusing like an iron brand, upon his finger, as black as the guilt burning in his heart. Plagg resides within, and refuses to come out no matter how he begs and threatens and pleads.

He can’t find it in himself to blame the little spirit. If someone close to him had betrayed all the ideals that the Black Knight was supposed to uphold, had taken the oaths he had sworn with God as his witness and shattered them over his knee in a moment of petty greed, he wouldn’t speak to him either. As it is he’s resisting the urge to throw himself upon the pyre as well.

He should have been more careful, should have been more circumspect. Jeanne had refused any offers of anonymity, of course, but what had she had to fear? She had Michael at her shoulder and Christ as her shield, and, some darkly cynical part of him remarks, she was a Frenchwoman in the heart of France, whereas he’d been the enemy and a traitor---twice over, now. He’d known from the start that people would suffer they were close enough even to hear him speak.

But he’d let Jeanne’s confidence wear away his guard, and he’d started speaking more openly, and soon enough those rumors of a treacherous English lord colluding with the French had spread too far to contain. And then someone of moderate intelligence had noticed how he’d been sneaking away and put two and two together.

They’d given him a choice. Either he and all his progeny could be stripped of his lands and his title, his son exiled and he himself placed on trial and in all likelihood executed for high treason, or he could give them a little information.  


He’d tried to limit the damage he did, of course. He’d delay his reports until they were nearly useless, alter the numbers just so, so that the commanders would alter their strategies accordingly. And it had worked, perching on the blade’s edge between aiding them o’er much and aiding them not at all.  


And then his King had lost, and they had declared that they would have a head. Either his and all his line’s, or the Maid’s.  


And he’d been a coward.

He ought to have stood for the truth, that the war had been started over a petty dispute, out of petty greed, and that it deserved the end that it had met. He could have smuggled his son and his wife away, though they would lose everything in their exile, and he would be a dead man.

But he’d been a coward.  


The priest completes the last rites, and Jeanne’s gaze, searching the crowd, locks on his.  


Jeanne smiles at him, gently, sadly. It breaks something in him, the quiet look on her face.

He could do something now. The power would still come to him if he called strongly enough. The Black Knight could save her. The Black Knight had the strength of ten men, could outpace a horse at full gallop. The Black Knight’s skin alone could turn away blade and bolt alike; his armor could withstand lance and arrow.  


But then his thoughts flick to his family, under watch. He looks away.  


“I forgive you!” she shouts to him, just before her executioners put flame to tinder.

He’s a coward. He turns and walks quickly away as the Maiden dies.  



End file.
